Ąžuolas Dunaravich
Report #2
While I am ‘bilingual’, to some degree, in Russian and English, I thought it would be more informative to interview my Japanese roommate, Asako, a Japanese exchange student who has been studying in the US for four years, inasmuch as it seems that the real conflicts inherent in bilingualism are only fully manifested in the case of permanent or semi-permanent extraction from one’s native culture and language and placement in another. Asako is one of the people whom I interviewed earlier for the domain analysis project. She grew up in Japan, is a Japanese citizen, and unconflictedly views herself as Japanese. She is from an old samurai family in Japan, and has inherited a strong sense of traditional bushido values. However, her professional interests lie in America, and she has therefore been forced to learn English and adapt to American culture.
I structured my interview more or less formally, asking 15 open-ended questions about bilingualism and getting acclimated to life in the US. The subject is, of course, not a native speaker of English, but it is for this reason that some misunderstandings of the questions are interesting for the purposes of this report on their own. For instance, I asked the subject what things, specifically, she has to do differently in the US to fit in as a ‘normal’ member of society. In reply, I received a 10 minute list of social obligations that exist in Japan that have no equivalent in the US. Since Asako is my roommate, I have had the opportunity to personally see her American-acculturation in action, but this report is mainly based on her responses to my interview questions.
Asako, age 22, first began studying English in seventh grade, in middle school, as part of a requirement for all Japanese schoolchildren. She says that she was more naturally gifted in English, and did better than the other students, but was not any more motivated for learning English at the time than the other students. Asako’s mother later married an American, but Asako still generally speaks to him in Japanese as opposed to English, and said he was not influential in improving her English. She cited as more of an influence the fact that her mother taught a business English class for foreigners, which in some measure helped shape her view of English as a language which exists for conducting business and making money. Asako continued to study English throughout middle and high school, and in her senior year, moved to Texas to further her English studies.
Asako considers the massive size of America’s land mass to be one of the major formulative factors of American culture. The most shocking thing about America, all the more so because her first exposure to the US was Texas, was the sense of endless resources that is a corollary of having much more land than people. When she first came to America, she was utterly horrified to see people in a restaurant throw away the extra food they didn’t finish, as opposed to eating it or bringing it home to be eaten later. This, of course, is not only no big deal in Texas, being considered perhaps even a good sign of self-control, it is often followed by asking ‘so, what should we have for dessert?’. In Japan, it is very rude to throw away food after a meal. All food, down to the last grain of rice, must be either kept or eaten. Asako recalled one incident from when she was 8 or so, and she was over at a cousin’s house. After the meal, she put her dish, covered in stray pieces of rice, in the sink and went out to play with her cousins. When she returned to the kitchen, she saw her great aunt eating the excess rice, and was hit by an overwhelming sense of mottainai. From that time on, she says, she has never been able to either leave a scrap of food on a plate, or to fully feel comfortable around others who do so. This taboo exists irregardless of poverty or actual economic need to conserve resources.
Mottainai is one of the so-called
‘cultural key words’ of Japanese, and lacks equivalents in other
languages. It is derived from mottai meaning something like ‘inherent
dignity’, and nai, Japanese’s
negative particle. This sense of
‘without dignity’ refers specifically to an undignified use of food or
time. It is translated into English in
such clumsy phraseology as “it is so
wasteful that things are not made full use of their value”[1]
or “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Repair.” It
is a word that refers back to two traditions.
The first is the more recent: the material scarcity suffered during
World War II. Japan, like every
participant in that war, suffered privations that had long-term impacts on the
culture’s sense of plenty. More
important, though, is its association with Buddhism’s sense of dignity, mottai.
In Zen Buddhism, every object in the universe has a worth and a destiny,
which is referred to as mottai. This is in some respect informed by the
animism of Shinto, which has created the concept of en or ‘connection’, in Zen Buddhism. In Zen, everything is intimately connected with, in essence even
a part of, the perceiving self. Mottainai, therefore, is literally
behavior that denies the reality of this tie.
It is the nageku, or ‘sin’ of
treating objects as if they are not important, and thus failing to realize
their connection with everything else, that a person throwing away food
commits. Nageku, in turn, cannot really be translated as ‘sin’, a highly
Christian-specific concept. Instead, it
means something like ‘thing to be regretted, cried over, felt sorry for’. While the word mottainai has been exploited by environmentalists worldwide, it is
important to note that it refers specifically to time, money or food, not
objects or anything else. It is this
lack of concern over wasting time, for instance when entering a bus, or leaving
food uneaten that strikes Asako as the area in which Americans are the
‘rudest’.
When asked whether she is
a different person when speaking English, Asako answered yes without
hesitation. Most basically, the ‘tone’
on which she speaks is fundamentally different in English and Japanese. This leads to an English-language personage
as a ‘quiet, harmless, helpless, poor little Japanese girl’. A lack of comfort with English leaves her
with a frustrating feeling of being somehow weaker. Asako said she feels unable to fully express the most important
things, such as what she’s thinking, doing, planning on doing, etc. in a truly
effective manner. In general, she feels
unable to seize the reins of social situations in English. In class, for instance, she listens and can
understand more or less everything that’s going on, but can’t really talk as
much as the other students, and therefore cannot feel as much a part of the
group and discussion. English, being a
second language, is an inadequate tool for logical argumentation, and Asako
expressed frustration at her accent causing people to think she was stupider or
less competent than she is. Because of
these difficulties, she lacks the ability to dominate a discussion, or to
freely joke and banter, and generally to exhibit comfort and confidence in group
situations.
When speaking Japanese and
around Japanese people, however, Asako says that she is a completely different
person. Japanese has forms and
constructions which are distinctly ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ (not in the grammatical
sense), and which have a strong flavor of a power relationship, predictably
enough, assigning the inferior role to women.
In this respect, Asako is markedly ‘masculine’ in Japanese, tending to
use forms that indicate a favorable power relationship. This may be from her aristocratic
background. However, when socializing
with Japanese people, in contrast to the case with Americans, Asako strongly
prefers the company of her elders. In
Japanese, age is one of the primary discursive considerations, which means that
Asako’s Japanese tends to be exaggeratedly formal, because she is speaking
constantly to her elders. Asako said
there is an inherent sense of hierarchy that exists in Japanese but has no
equivalent in English. However, when
Asako is among her own Japanese age-peers, she tends to assume a leadership
role. She feels strongly the contrast
between her Japanese self, who was vice president of one of Japan’s most
prestigious high schools (in Japan, high school is, in many ways, much more
important than college), and the quiet, studious, submissive girl that she
feels English forces her to become.
Another big difference is that she uses humor a great deal in her
conversations in Japanese, much of which refers to the differences between the
western dialect spoken in her native Yokohama, and standard Japanese. These kinds of intra-linguistic tools are
not really available to Asako in English, and she feels less able to be funny
(laughed with, not at) in English, and thus less like the type of person who is
able to influence a group.
While code switching is
often used in many multi-lingual communities as a source of humor, Asako
reported that she does not code switch for this purpose in any way. Instead, her code switching generally takes
two forms. First is under conditions of
great stress or emotional excitement, in which she feels compelled to return to
Japanese: English is still a thing which requires a certain level of composure
and concentration. The more common form
of code switching is the intra-sentence replacing of Japanese words with
English ones. Since WWII, English has
been a language of extreme prestige in Japanese, which has lead to a massive
wave of borrowings that can be difficult to assign to the category of
‘borrowed’ or ‘loan’ words. It is a mark
of prestige to pronounce these words in the English way, saying, for instance,
‘blanket’, as opposed to ‘buranketto’, which is how the word has been
re-analyzed according to Japanese phonology.
In addition to this kind of borrowing, it is common for Japanese living
in America to make heavy use of certain English adjectives and adverbs, all of
which seem to assign a kind of emotional quality that the corresponding words
in Japanese lack. Prominent among these
are incredibly, extremely, or favorite, once again with both Japanese
and American pronunciations being possible, the American pronunciation being
the prestigious variant. When the
English variant is chosen, thus generating phrases like
(1) ‘boko-no feborito-na hon-wa’
I-GENITIVE favorite-PASSIVE
book-SUBJECT
‘my favorite book’,
as opposed to
(2) ‘boku-no suki-na hon-wa’,
I-GENITIVE
love-PASSIVE book-SUBJECT
‘my favorite book’
variations like (1) are considered to be more of an emotional, subjective
judgment. It should be noted that,
while the particle –na is a
derivational morpheme forming a sort of instrumental-adjective out of verb-like
nouns like suki[2],
it is applied to words like ‘favorite’, which is already an adjective, it
forces the word into a different part of speech than it originally belonged to
in its source language, most likely because English does not have a part of
speech applying to noun-verbs like suki. It is hard to identify what characteristics
of code switching truly belong to ‘bilinguals’, since English is required for
all citizens of Japan at some level, and is omnipresent in popular
culture.
While English is often
used to give things an emotional emphasis in Japanese, Asako feels that English
alone is inadequate for emotional expression.
She said she was not sure whether to attribute this to English as a
language, or just to her lack of experience and comfort with it. She said that because her English suffers
when she’s upset, she is in effect forced not to express her emotions in
English, even though she feels it’s culturally acceptable. On the other hand, in Japan, while she is
certainly comfortable enough with Japanese to express herself, the culture
itself generally forbids such direct expression.
For talking about
emotions, Asako feels that English and Japanese stand on more or less equal
footing for her. However, because of
the homogeneity of Japanese society, there’s an unusually large amount that can
be assumed to be held in common with one’s interlocutor, and thus is it much
easier to explain, for instance, one’s parents’ divorce in Japanese, even
though it is just as easy to say the same things in English: much more will be
understood by a native speaker of Japanese.
When asked whether the
Japanese and Americans have the same emotions, Asako answered a definite
yes. Thus, receptively, she feels she
can understand people’s emotions just as well when they’re speaking English as
when they’re speaking Japanese, because the cues are, to some degree, human
universals. The differences lie in what
sorts of things trigger these emotions.
Therefore, depression, regret, sadness, and various similar Japanese
words all describe the exact same thing, but differ with respect to the cause. What a culture trains its people to regard
as adequate cause for an emotion is infinitely variable, but the emotions that
culture can work with form a limited inventory.
When I asked Asako in what
respects Americans are more ‘rude’ than the Japanese, the first on the list was
the utter lack of a sense on mottainai. This is symbolized by “turning up the heater
in winter and just walking around in a tee shirt. Americans don’t care about waste.” After this comes what she
refers to as the Christian sense of possession. Americans do not worry about the ownership of low-value items,
and for that reason, if an American borrows a pen, they’re probably not
planning on returning it. In Japan, it
is considered a sign of a healthy friendship if a pair has a good accounting, which
is to say an extensive inventory of who had done what and bought what for
whom. In America, this is viewed as
extremely hostile. This leads to a
large number of low-level conflicts.
For instance, despite the fact that we’ve known each other for years,
and I have been renting a room from her since the beginning of this year, Asako
persists in asking my permission every time she wants to drink one of my diet
cokes, which I drink around 10 of a day.
I have made it clear dozens of times that I don’t care how many of them
she drinks, but because in Japanese culture, major obligations would be being
incurred by such a borrowing process, she remains highly resistant to this kind
of thinking. This applies also to
situations like candy in a professor’s office.
Despite having been answered with quips such as “no, I’m saving it for
the coming candy famine”, Asako feels extremely uncomfortable with taking candy
out of a communal bowl, and persists in asking permission. In general, she is sometimes bothered by
Americans’ forgoing of the thank yous and sorrys that form the backbone of
Japanese social interaction among more distant interlocutors.
When I asked her if there
are any ways that Americans are more polite than the Japanese, Asako answered
“not at all! Your language doesn’t even
have any respectful forms!”. She then
conceeded that she feels Americans have much more of a sense of chivalry to
women and protection of minorities, but she feels that this stems less from any
kind of politeness as such, than out of the fact that Americans regard minorities
and women as ‘weak’, and thus in need of special treatment.
At the same time, however,
Asako feels a certain level of ‘ease’ in English-speaking company that she
doesn’t feel in Japanese company. While
I would perhaps express the concept as freedom, Asako, perhaps as a relic of
Japanese categorization, strictly categorized it as ‘feeling at ease’. This includes many simple things, like
relaxed posture, chewing gum, showing one’s teeth, applying makeup in public,
and not having to worry about slowing down the bus by getting on slowly. For these reasons, and because of the
general ease, in the social sense, of American life, Asako said that although
she feels much more at home speaking Japanese than English, she feels more
comfortable and at home in America than in Japan.
As far as the actual
languages of English and Japanese, Asako prefers simplicity. She is a microbiologist, and is irritated by
that science’s especial love of giving creatures names like Corynebacterium pseudodiphtheriticum and
Haemophilus parainfluenzae. For reasons related to Optimal Morpheme
Length (visible in English in that we have almost no morphemes that are not
relatively recent borrowing or place names which are more than two, or at most
three syllables. The same holds for
Russian), Japanese productively shortens all morphemes, over time, to two
syllables. This gives the language one
of the world’s highest densities of homophones, which are written differently
in the Kanji script. Thus, when
Japanese borrowed the Russian word саботаж,
it borrowed it as saboru, with –ru being the verbal ending. Similarly, the English word disrespect was adapted as ditsuru. English is made much more efficient than Japanese, on the other
hand, by its lack of formalities. While
English is, with respect to the other languages of Europe, exceedingly formal
(we began to drop the informal thou, along with the original meaning of words
like friend, while including a large number of forms such as ‘would you be so
kind’ centuries ago), it pales in comparison to Japanese in situations that
demand a high level of formality. Thus,
it is much simpler, even given language barriers, to write a resume and a cover
letter in English than in Japanese, because in English if the job requires a
cover letter, then the level of formality is more or less set, and there are
simple formulae to follow. In Japanese,
the unknowns, such as the recipient’s age and gender, make choosing from the
various levels of formality more difficult.
I asked Asako if, given
the chance, she would be willing to completely and permanently forget Japanese
in favor of English, and she initially answered affirmatively. However, when she thought about the idea for
a while in Japanese, she changed her mind.
In Japan, there exists a massive family registry, called the戸籍 (koseki). This registry, started (at least mythically)
in 646AD, is considered the arbiter of true Japaneseness. It is very important to Asako that, even
were she to get married to an American, her children be registered with the koseki.
The koseki serves the function
of marriage certificate, death certificate, birth certificate, divorce
certificate, adoption certificate, and all other such functions in Japan. It gives a sense of eternity. As Asako said, she knows that not just her
parents, grandparents, and great grandparents all lived in Japan, spoke
Japanese, and were a part of the Japanese nation, but that, according to the
registry, her great8 grandparents did as well. Their status as samurai is recorded
throughout the centuries in a single registry that binds the nation
together. To be the weak link in such a
chain would be extremely dishonorable.
Asako mentioned several
very negative stereotypes of Japanese who are willing or whose families have
been willing to move to the US and abandon their Japanese citizenship. They are from a class of people called the burakumin. Buraku means village,
and min means people, but the word as
a whole is usually translated as ‘untouchable’. Asako herself uses the word ‘slave’ to translate the
expression. The burakumin were a group of people, later mythologized as being some
sort of an ethnos, who performed tasks associated with money or death, and thus
became ritually unclean. This is
recorded in the koseki, and some
cities have been found, in recent scandals, to be keeping secret lists of who
is a burakumin, despite the fact that
the category was legally abolished in 1871.
These are people without honor, at least as some Japanese see it,
inasmuch as honor is something given by other people, and something inherited
from one’s ancestors. Some from the
noble and samurai castes feel that there is only one reason that someone would
be willing to write one’s self and family out of the national registry: to run
from medieval associations with the untouchable caste which persist in
importance, especially in western Japan, to the modern day. The subject of the burakumin is very taboo in modern Japan, and Asako vehemently
insisted that she has no biases against them.
However, she feels that they are people who ‘hate Japan’ and “lose their
language, lose their culture, lose their Japanese names.” She also said that she “can recognize this
type of person” and “doesn’t really want anything to do with this type of
person”.
Thus, when the question
was phrased in terms of becoming an American, or even of forgetting Japanese
and replacing it with English, Asako said she would be eager to do it. However, when it was phrased in terms of
ceasing to be Japanese and not having one’s children entered in the koseki, the idea became
unacceptable. To be Japanese,
especially for a descendant of the old samurai aristocracy, is to be part of a
massive family that is still seen as having the Emperor at its head, and which
has, at least mythically, continuity going back thousands of years. This is contrasted with the American general
disregard of history.
In terms of general
comments, I think the most relevant points are that Asako makes no distinction
between Japanese language, Japanese culture, and Japan itself. She, along with many Japanese, insists that
without am internal understanding of Japanese culture conferred by a Japanese
upbringing, a foreigner cannot hope to learn to communicate like a native, and
this works in a feedback loop with Japan’s general closedness to make the
language synonymous with the culture and the nation. Anyone who is in the koseki
is a part of Japan, and anyone who isn’t, isn’t. As far as emotion and language, Asako did not view English itself
as more or less communicative than Japanese, but rather viewed Japanese people
as being much more able to pick up on subtext.
There is an isolation process which is going on in both the US and
Japan. This isolation alone could be
(and is) the topic of an entire book, but suffice it to say that both Japan and
the US are seeing a revolution in the amount of time that people spend with
other people, both for professional and non-professional reasons. What the
Japanese have that we don’t is a common understanding of the causes of emotions:
to a Japanese person, the same stimulus will cause the same emotion, and there
is thus an extreme closeness among the Japanese even as their culture grows
more and more isolating. This is not
mirrored by any such closeness in America, which means that although our
technological isolation is not as advanced as that in Japan, our ability to
relate to one another is noticeably lower.
This is a problem that Asako sees between not just herself and
Americans, but between Americans themselves.